Sevish Music

Sevish - Vidya (10-EDO microtonal chiptune) (2017x4)

: 17, 2017

I grew up playing video games. I still play them today, but when I was a kid my favourite system was the Sega Mega Drive. One thing that always brings me back to those simple times is hearing the sound of the Mega Drive’s FM synth. It has a characteristic grating and bright sound that I just love. I bought a VST instrument called FMDrive which quite faithfully reproduces the sound of the original Mega Drive sound chip. The only problem was that it couldn’t be microtuned. I wrote a couple of emails to the developer, Aly James, and he sent me a custom build of his synth with support for microtonal equal-tempered scales. The first thing I did was make this track in 10-EDO. It’s my first time using 10-EDO. I tried to focus on using it like a warped diatonic scale instead of two interlocking 5-EDO scales, but you can hear both approaches used.